Science & Technology

Enabling academic and economic settings are the key factors towards sustaining the global growth and business. Owing to its large pool of technical manpower, India over the past two decades has become the knowledge-hub for rest of the world. On the other hand, India needs to continue to create highly skilled professionals to ensure its own success, which in return opens up new avenues for cooperation in the field of higher education.

Global S&T Alliances

Today’s globalization of knowledge sector is mostly driven by demand and supply factors, which often overlook the necessity of mainstreaming the higher education sectors in India. International experiences in managing higher education also through private funding are a valid and deserving model towards the need of Indian Youth. In the phase of global economy, India has been lucky, more by accident than by design because it made available to the world a pool of skilled, scientific English speaking manpower. Therefore, India is faced with the challenge of gearing up its higher education institutions to meet the growing demand for qualified persons. India cannot alone address the needs of higher education that are inevitable be able to host the R&D and backroom office facilities of the world’s best companies.

Education is a trillion Dollar industry worldwide bringing the debate whether higher education is a commercial service or a public good to an end. According to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), over 2 million university students among the world's total of around 100 million study outside their home country. Since the late 1990s the higher education market is growing by 7 per cent a year. The Economist Survey on higher education further indicates that annual fee income alone is estimated at $30 billion. While private profit seeking companies have entered the education business, even government-controlled universities are seeking independence from governmental authority. In contrast to many other English-speaking countries including USA, Canada, UK and Australia, Germany continue to control their fee-structure to offer university education to their students. Unlike India, where foreign students are generally made to pay much higher fees than local students, the higher education in Germany for qualified students is free.

We are optimally placed to facilitate mutually beneficial long-term student-exchange program and in building up bilateral institutional relationships.

India is not just at the lower end of the software and other labor-intensive research business, but is now in a leading position of the scientific and financial research revolution. The high-end technology leadership of the west is now coming under threat from India. To address the global clash with India on the rise of white-collar jobs and implications on the rest of the world, many multi-national companies and leading centers of higher learning have opened their arms in India to be a part of this revolution and not to miss the unique potential of the largest and youngest skilled force in the world. In August 2006, India announced 1312 applications for drug patents, a record second only to the US. It is 25 per cent higher than Germany which is the third in ranking, and ahead of Britain, Japan, etc.

Higher education is already a global business: India is undoubtedly at par with the top economies of the world, when it comes to knowledge sector. As Business Week (22-29 August, 2005) has concluded: ‘unlike China, India’s significant cheap labor is not a pool of factory workers, but a huge crop of scientists’.

As India grows into a knowledge providing superpower, a host of facilities will need to be provided in terms of ensuring a steady supply of skill-intensive workers with the requisite qualifications. For international companies, it comes as an opportunity to build their knowledge-base at the origin by joining hands in the business of providing higher education. The economic role of global higher education is a contemporary reality embedded in the civic, intellectual and moral purposes of advanced learning and we are committed to contribute to this noble cause through our business partners.